Malaysian Bat Education Adventure

Mum and the four kittens

If you followed the MBEA last year, you may remember there was a cat that used to hang out around the field station (Kuala Lompat Cat). You can see her here at the bottom of this page. She was a very noisy individual, always meiowing and getting in the way, and we realised after a while that she was pregnant. She gave birth to three kittens after I left the field. We aren’t sure what happened to Lompat Cat herself she disappeared not long after her kittens weaned, but two of those were “adopted” by Ain (or better to say they adopted Ain), and are now healthy ginger adults. The female gave birth last week to four kittens of her own. She had them in an old cabinet outside the house, but started to move them today into a desk in the boys’ bedroom, so we decided to relocate the whole family to a box which is currently on the porch.

Three of the four kittens

Hi Folks,
We got rained off last night; it started pouring with rain at about 6.30 pm and then was on and off for most of the night, so we had to close the traps. We don’t trap when it rains for a couple of reasons. First, we catch far fewer bats then when it is wet; either the bats aren’t out foraging (because the insects aren’t out) or the bats can avoid the traps more easily because rain droplets on the harp trap strings mean the bats can detect them more easily with their echolocation. If we have a low number of captures because of the rain it makes it difficult to compare data. We want to see if the bat diversity at Kuala Lompat in 2010 is the same as the diversity in 2009. But, if we trap when it rains in 2010 our catch rate (number of bats caught with the same number of traps) might be lower than in 2009 and we won’t be able to tell if it is this because of the rain or because there was something biologically different between the two years.

The other reason I don’t like to trap in heavy rain is for safety reasons — often the heavy rain is accompanied by high winds, and trees and branches may fall down. Last month Ain was in the old lab here at Lompat doing some work when a storm came through and a tree fell on the lab building. It knocked out the power and scared Ain near to death. She needed help to get out as there were branches blocking the door. So being in the forest in a storm is not a good idea!!

It is hot and humid today after all the rain, and big clouds are building, but I am keeping my fingers crossed that we don’t miss another night’s catch due to rain.

Dr Kingston

Trails trapped on the 12th of May (in red)

Greetings All,
We continue up the main trail with traps KL0014, KL0016, KL0018, KL0020, KL0022, KL0024, KL0026, KL0028, KL0030, KL0032, KL0034, KL0036. The catch rate was a little low for that trail but we think it was because we had a huge storm at about 11 pm. It poured with rain for at least 2 hours! It was a good night for Hipposideros diadema and Hipposideros ridleyi, who were nice additions to some of our more common captures.

Once again, nearly all the females are lactating – we definitely seem to be in the peak of the breeding season. In a few more weeks we should be seeing alot of juveniles as the young of this year start to learn to fly and become independent of their mothers. Although the mother bats may continue to feed their young milk on occasion for upto 4-5 weeks, the young are almost adult size within the first 2-3 weeks. Bat babies are born big and grow up fast!

On to the data:

Best wishes,
Dr Kingston

I thought I’d give a quick explanation of why I started writing the scientific names for the bat species with a line underneath like this Hipposideros ridleyi in the last post.  Species names should be in italics, like they are in the table of data, but for some reason I’m having a hard time persuading the web site we work through to do that!!

The old way to indicate that something should be written in italics was to underline the word. So instead of Hipposideros ridleyi it is Hipposideros ridleyi. It goes back to before people used computers and had to write everything by hand. No electronic printers back then either, so if something had to be printed it was prepared on what was called a printing press, where each letter was a little block with the raised letter on it that got inked before paper was flattened over it. If you ever cut shapes out of potatoes and printed with paint on a piece of paper, it was the same thing, only they had to do that for entire books!

When the author wanted to tell the person setting up the little printing blocks that the word needed to be in italics he or she would underline the word, so that the printer could switch over to italic letters! So I’ll be doing that until we can solve the problem!

Dr Kingston.

Trails trapped on the 11th May (shown in red)

Hi Everyone,
Wow a busy night last night! If you look at the map, you can see we had some of the traps on the T trail, and some going up the main trail. The main trail is quite a bit wider than many of the other trail, and this might explain why we got three of our biggest species — Hipposideros diadema. The traps on trail T were KL0431, KL0433, KL0435, KL0437, KL0439, KL0441. On the main trail they were KL0002, KL0004, KL0006, KL0008, K0010, KL0012. You will notice that the numbers on the main trail are even, and on trail T are odd. We are now trapping red poles (even numbers) again as we start trapping the grid from the beginning again, so all the trap numbers from now on will be even. The weather is dry and hot again.

You may wonder why there are no data for one of the Hipposideros diadema and Rhinolophus lepidus. That’s because they managed managed to escape before we collected all the data we needed!! Aaagghhh!!!

So here are last night’s data:

Fingers crossed for another good night tonight!
Dr Kingston